Creating Payment Plans, Recurring Payments, or Membership Sites

And how we help you handle failed payments, course access, and updating customer credit card billing information.

Written by Jason Zook Updated over a week ago

If you're looking to offer payment plans for your courses, monthly subscriptions, or yearly memberships, our recurring payment page feature should do just the trick!

To create a payment plan or recurring payment:

Login to Teachery

From your Dashboard, select a course

In the course editor, create a new Payment Page

Select Recurring Monthly* or Recurring Yearly

Set your monthly/yearly price and select the amount of months/years**

Create and customize!

*Whether you choose Monthly or Yearly for your recurring payments, your customers credit card will be charged on the same day of the month as their first purchase (Ex: They bought a monthly plan on April 12, their next charge will be May 12. If a customer buys a yearly plan on April 12, their next charge will be April 12 the following year.

**By default, we'll set any recurring payment (monthly or yearly) to infinite payments going forward. Changing the the amount of months/years when creating your recurring payment will set a specific timeframe.

Want to create a payment plan for your course?

You'll already have a fixed price payment page (one time payment), then all you need to do is create a new, separate recurring payment page. For example, let's say your course is $300 and you want to have a 6-month payment plan option:

Login, navigate to your course, create new Payment Page

Name your Payment Page

Select "Recurring Monthly" for the Payment Type

Set the Monthly Price to $50

Set the How Many Months to 6

Create and customize the payment page!

That payment page will allow a customer to buy your $300 course, but only pay $50 per month for the next 6 months. You can then link to your fixed price payment page ($300) and your new recurring payment page ($50/mo x 6 months) on your Teachery Landing Page and have pricing options!

Looking to have a "membership site" where you get paid on a recurring basis and deliver more content to your customers?

We put "membership site" in quotes because Teachery is still a course platform at its core. That said, our recurring payment pages are perfectly suited to build a course that is essentially a membership site.

There are no additional steps needed, just think of your course as a membership portal. The recurring payment page you create (as outlined above) will charge your customer on the schedule you decide. Then, you can add additional lessons and content to your course as time goes on. Feel free to use our drip content feature to show your customers what future content will be coming down the pipe!

How we help you handle failed recurring payments...

Bad news: You will almost always encounter failed payments when selling anything with recurring payments. It's just the nature of the beast. We're sorry to break this to you.

Good news! The good news is, we have you covered!

When you create your first recurring payment page, you will find a new email you can customize within your course editor:

Click Edit on your course (from My Courses page)

Look in the left sidebar for EMAILS

Click the Recurring Payment Failed email

You can customize that email, including the subject line, from name, from email, logo, email colors, and content.

IMPORTANT: Please do not remove the "UPDATE YOUR BILLING" link. If you want to change the text, you may do that, but ensure that the link stays in the email otherwise your student won't be able to fix the failed payment issue.

Our recurring payment failed emails work like this:

When the first recurring payment fails, your recurring payment failed email will be sent to your customer.

If they do not take action, another TWO emails will be sent on a varying schedule (this schedule is determined by Stripe).

If your customer updates their billing information at any time, no more failed payment emails will be sent and they will be good to go!

Should your customer NOT update their billing information after the 3rd email, we will roadblock course access from the student on your behalf. This means if they try to login to the course, they will only see the billing update page (no matter what page of your course they try to view).

If your customer never updates their billing information, they will continue to be locked out of your course forever (until they add billing info again).

Pro-tip: If you're using a recurring payment option, we recommend creating a spreadsheet of your own that you update on the schedule in which your payments get requested (monthly, annually, etc). This is a tedious task, but it's also the best way to ensure you're keeping an eye on your customer's payment activity.

Revoke Access: By clicking this link you will be removing a customer's access to your course. This will not refund any existing payments and will not cancel any recurring payment subscriptions your customer might have. This CAN be undone by clicking Grant Access (which appears only after you Revoke Access).

Refund: You can refund a single payment OR you'll see individual payments for recurring payment purchases. You can refund any payments and refunding will not result in revoking access to your course. We recommend refunding payments via your Customer Profiles in Teachery instead of within your Stripe account, because it keeps the records up to date in Teachery.

Cancel Subscription: If a customer has purchased your course via a recurring payment page and you want to stop any future payments, use the Cancel Subscription link. This will not refund your customer and will not revoke access: Their payments will simply come to an end.

Updating Customer Billing Info: If a customer purchases a recurring payment plan, but needs to update their credit card information, we make it really easy. Simply give your customer the URL of your course with "/billing" added to the end. For example, if your course URL is yourcourse.teachery.co, you would give them yourcourse.teachery.co/billing - that's it! (If you use a custom domain or custom subdomain, you can give them that URL with /billing on the end.)

🎥 Watch the two walk-through videos below for more information and seeing recurring payments in action!